Review of: Padfield, Peter. Maritime Supremacy and the Opening of the Western Mind. New York: The Overlook Press. 1999.

The book Maritime Supremacy and the Opening of the Western Mind presents a thesis that sea power, sea-borne commerce, and the use of these assets in war and peace, has had a decisive influence on modern history. Author Peter Padfield states no less than that maritime supremacy in its broadest political (which includes the military), economic, cultural, and social contexts has been the key reason for the birth of the liberal democracy and the superior wealth these types of nations produced.

Padfield begins his narrative with some explanations on what he means by “maritime supremacy” and its difference with traditional concepts of sea power. Padfield uses introductory material on his thesis by quickly describing the role of the Mediterranean city-state of Venice; how Venice controlled Europe’s access to Eastern knowledge and trade goods; the role Venice played in the “rebirth” of modern society from the Middle Ages through its trade and commerce; the key role of bankers that Venitians developed to finance Europe’s awakening into modern arts, literature, industry and capital formation; and how Venice used its vast wealth to build and lead a coalition navy that stopped the conquest of the Muslim Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Lepanto in 1577.

Venice is the early modern template for a successful maritime supremacy, which the author says is not merely warships and battle fleets, sea lines of communication (SLOCs) or defeat of the enemy at sea. Sea power in the more limited sense, was first popularized in the 1880s by U.S. Navy Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan. Sea power is part of Padfield’s maritime thesis. But even more, maritime tradition and its use in diplomacy, trade, banking, and war is a culture’s commitment to the sea as a source of livelihood and wealth. It is a nation’s tradition, the determination of geography, demography, and resources that points seaward for both security and prosperity.

Maritime supremacy is the mobilization of sea power, sea-borne trade, and the financial resources from commercial profits. It is the indoctrination of a whole society toward an effort to not only dominate the seas in war and peace, but to use that dominance in a strategic and effective way to fight enemies or establish dominance over them. It is a lesson of history that when the vital SLOC of Europe’s trade shifted from the Mediterranean, Venice declined in wealth, power and importance. The shift of global sea lanes of communication moved from the Near East to the seaboards of Europe. Wheat, shipping timber, tar and pitch (the latter three strategic ship-building materials) shifted to the Baltic routes. Spices and exotic foods, textiles, paper, and gems shifted to the southern Atlantic coming from the Indian Ocean, bypassing the slow, dangerous route across the mainland of Asia. And gold and silver, slaves, fish, woolens, animals, dyes, sugars, and tobacco--staple products for thriving Europe–shifted further into lanes of the North Atlantic as they shipped from the America’s. With the shift of the means and ways of commerce, so did the shift in power move to unexpected places, one being the water-logged, resource-deprived land of the United Provinces: Holland and its neighbors.

According to Padfield, the United Provinces are the first true modern maritime power. Tiny Holland and her sister republics fought a revolution using sea-going pirates to gain independence from Hapsburg Spain. They fought England to a draw in numerous wars of massed fleets. In fact, a daring Dutch Admiral forced England to sue for peace with his bold raid up the Thames and the Medway estuaries to cripple the Royal Navy at its safest base at Chatham.

Padfield also says that the Dutch rise to control over the commerce of northern Europe, becoming the profitable middlemen in trade, gave rise to an Enlightened society in the United Provinces. The Dutch were known for sharp and clean dress and homes, for sumptuous tastes and diets. But the Dutch also allowed the freest minds to express the freest, most radical ideas of any thinkers up to that time in history. Philosophers like Descartes and Spinoza shared their revolutionary ideas on humanity, god, and government, which were considered heresy punishable by torture and death elsewhere in Christian Europe. Padfield says that the Dutch censored themselves where necessary to keep piety in place and chaos away. He goes on to say that the formation of the Dutch government into a self-governing organization of non-noble, non-royal assemblies of merchants ensured the rule of popular government. The merchant and financial class gave credit to build warships and finance war through debt subscription. The republican government of the country was regulated by the self-interest of these merchants and bankers who had the most to lose from bad government decisions. They governed their country for their own benefit.

The pattern of the Dutch was followed by the English after the 1688 “Glorious Revolution.” The English Revolution, which saw the only successful invasion of the British Isles since 1066, placed the Dutch Captain- and Admiral-General William of Orange and his wife, the daughter of the deposed king, on the throne of England. Protestant William and Mary became monarchs under a guarantee of constitutional rule, and they established a bill of rights in English law, ensuring the dominance of the elected parliament over the treasury of the English government. Before William and Mary, the Catholic kings of the House of Stuart and their insatiable appetite for arbitrary taxes and forced loans to fight expensive wars caused the merchants in England to favor revolution. The post-revolutionary form of parliamentary government exists in Great Britain to this day.

During the 1700s, English commitment to maritime supremacy created a truly global British Empire. Britain dedicated herself to creating and securing trade, which in turn created and serviced a national debt to finance the construction of warships. The debt was used to buy allies in Europe during endless wars with France. From Louis XIV in 1688 and his War of the League of Augsburg to the end of Napoleon in 1815 at Waterloo, England used maritime supremacy to stymy the “Continental Strategy” of France. Relying on more and more massive armies, eventually conscripts, French strategy pursued costly and bloody campaigns on the European mainland to challenge England’s coalition on sea and land. Drained in treasure and men from wars of attrition, in every war but one France had to abandon its battle line fleets of superior-built ships. France conceded the wealth and strategic choices to Great Britain’s maritime supremacy. Behind the Royal Navy, Britannia ruled the world by ruling the waves.

In the one exception where France forgot her land-centered strategy and did not abandon her navy, it gained a local, temporary superiority in North America in 1781. As a result, the British army under Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. Britain’s government then fell, and the United States survived its own war for independence because of an allied victory at sea.

In the 21^st Century, maritime supremacy is still a relevant issue in world politics. The United States Navy has dominated the oceans effectively since 1921. The nation it serves has won hot and cold wars and gained unparalleled wealth behind a strategy of maritime supremacy to protect itself and preserve peaceful commerce around the globe. In essence, maritime supremacy is different from a maritime strategy of fighting a war. In Padfield’s description, supremacy is about controlling the sea in war, and pursuing and building wealth through the use of the sea in peace. A maritime strategy in war is the application of all maritime power, in short, to control the politics on land. For modern times, maritime supremacy is about using the sea as a way to access areas, to land and sustain expeditionary land campaigns striking from the sea; to defeat enemies wherever they are using the sea as a base; and to protect national interest and friendly nations in far parts of the globe with the maritime capability as a shield. 

One of the most troubling aspects of China’s continuing rise as a great power is its building of true sea power in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. It would only follow that China’s sophisticated leaders understand that maritime power is the future key to ensuring its security and access to the markets and resources it needs to be an eventual superpower. For the United States in reacting to this challenge by China, the answer is not a retreat from the challenge. The answer can only be a superior maritime ability, and pursuit, in war and peace, of the equipment, finances, trade, and skill–indeed living the very tradition–of maritime supremacy.

Closely related to maritime supremacy as a tool of national power is space supremacy. Many of the purely military utilities of sea power–sea shield, sea strike, sea base, and expeditionary access–have a future context in space. The main points of strategy in space may very well come from the military strategies behind maritime supremacy. Superpower status in the future depends on adapting maritime strategies to space. America’s oldest rival for space dominance, the former Soviet Union in the present form of Russia, is still a major player in space. As long as Russia maintains such an active and ambitious program in space capabilities, it has a claim to be an almost-superpower. It might very well be its policy to recapture such status by skipping over rebuilding its global sea power abilities by one day capturing the heavens above the Earth.

Most disturbing about this area of world power politics is, without surprise, China. China has made great leaps in the space race that it could never do on land under Mao Zedong. Not only has it succeeded in manned space flight on its own, joining only the U.S. and Russia in this very high club, but on January 18-19, 2007, China successfully tested an anti-satellite weapon. Again, it joins an exclusive U.S./Russia club in that achievement. The entire U.S. military depends on space for its core doctrine of warfare on earth–including war on, below, above and from the seas. China’s test is a direct prophecy of the type of war it would wage on the U.S. in a future conflict. It has long been recognized by philosophers and strategist that “he who controls space wins the world in the end.” A new arms race has been declared. As it was on the sea, national survival for some countries will ultimately depend on space supremacy. It is a battle for the future that America could no more afford to lose above the earth than it could or can afford to lose on the seas of the globe.